Note: This work is part of my in-progress Master of Arts Thesis in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) under the supervision of Dr. Jeffery Donaldson. For this project, I am re-visioning Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion as a visual book (Visions2011) combining creative prose with studio photography to explore contemporary cultural contentions of Blake’s Visions in a dually creative/scholarly manner.

I slowly reach out my right hand and sweep my fingertips along Calthalendula’s golden petals. As I pull my hand back in toward me, it follows its motion and rises from the mud on its powerful stem. Growing nearer to my face, I cup its head in my right hand and grasp its stalk with my left. With both of my hands embracing it, subtle shoots emerge from the ground and wind themselves softly up my body.

We are becoming one, Calthalendula and I. Its roots hug me tighter, and when I feel that I could no longer pull away had I wanted to, the centre of Calthalendula’s blossom opens. A hot glow radiates from it unto me, resting on my face, shoulders, and between my breasts. The intensity of its light consumes me until I can no longer see again and feel anything but its fire. A comfortable cool settles on my skin, and I open my eyes to see that Calthalendula has left me. I am now clothed, but alone again.

Yet you are not, Calthalendula’s voice whispers to me from inside me.”

-from Visions2011

In my re-visioning of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, I have inverted the genders of Oothoon and Bromion so that the heroine of Blake’s poem becomes the hero in mine as he, following this scene here, flies off to be with his (male) lover, but, on that journey, falls victim to his (female) rapist. As I have shifted the axes core to Visions, Oathe13 Embracing Calthalendula, too, follows in this oppositional vein as it counters the gender, sunlight, and angles of Blake’s “The Argument” plate so that, intervisually, it becomes a near-perfect mirror refraction. S. Foster Damon, in his A Blake Dictionary, writes that “[t]he Marygold (marigold) symbolizes the first experiment with sex [as t]he plucking of a flower is an ancient symbol for sexual experience” (265), and Northrop Frye, in his Fearful Symmetry, notes that “Oothoon has ‘pluck’d the flower’ of imaginative experience and has entered the state of innocence” (238). In my re-vision, Oathe13 (my male Oothoon character) embraces his “marigold” (named Calthalendula) to do just the same: awaken the powers of [sexual] exploration within him (Damon 265). Leopold Damrosch Jr., in his Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, writes that, in Visions, “Leutha’s vale had been the place of sexual initiation” (217), and while not given in the illustrated snippet of text from my visual book above, Calthalendula, upon initially meeting Oathe13, tells him, “[w]e are in Leutha. In the Land of Visions.”

A great deal of botanical scholarship in relation to Blake’s Visions fuels the conceptuality of this piece as well, for “[b]otany was a radical and sexualized discourse in the 1790s” (Bernath Walker). In her paper “‘In What Gardens Do Joys Grow?’: Queer Botanizing in Blake’s Visions, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, and Darwin’s Botanic Garden,” Elizabeth Bernath Walker notes that “Blake was one of the engravers who worked on [Darwin’s The Botanic Garden],” and that “[t]he influence of Darwin’s personification [of plants and plant ‘sex’] is evident in the opening prosopopoeia of Visions where Oothoon wanders in the vales of Leutha and comes upon a talking flower, an anthropomorphized marigold symbolizing the spirit of female sexuality.” She explains that there are “two discrete genera” for the common floral name marigold (the Caltha palustris – the marsh marigold – and the Calendula officinalis – the pot marigold) and that both are in Darwin’s text. Noting that “critical opinion is divided as to which genus Blake was referencing,” Bernath Walker explores the evidence on either camp revealing that David Worrall advocates for the pot marigold “based on the beams of light that Leutha’s marigold emits” (as Darwin references Calendula officinalis as emitting sparks) while Anne K. Mellor and Richard Matlak annotate the marigold in Visions as “caltha palustris, commonly called mayflower, a symbol of fertility in May Day festivals” (294). Bernath Walker ultimately suggests – although, in her paper, she primarily considers it the pot marigold – that it is “likely that both Calendula and Caltha contribute meaning to Blake’s text.” For my marigold, I merged the two possible genera into one überflower to encompass the cultural connotations of both possibilities. I dubbed it, appropriately, Calthalendula (a linguistic splicing of the two). My Calthalendula still emits light (recalling its half-namesake Calendula officinalis), for, as Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi note in their Introduction to Visions, “[o]ne thin line of radiance etched on the plate extends from the right-most marigold, but the other three shafts of light make it clear that they are all part of a sunrise” (237), yet it also retains the fertile connections to Caltha palustris.

These fertile and feminine connections and connotations are vitally interesting in my piece, for the schools of scholarship (very aptly so, given Oothoon’s female identity in Visions) all centre on the inherent femininity of her act. Sheila A. Spector, in her “Glorious Incomprehensible,” writes that “the action initiated by Oothoon’s choice to pluck Leutha’s flower encompasses the full range of female archetypes from virgin and mother to whore” (72 – emphasis mine). Furthermore, “Oothoon’s plucking of the flower strongly suggests the similar fatal act of Persephone” (Damon 265), and “[b]oth stories [Oothoon’s and Persephone’s] suggest at least a metonymic connection between the acts of literal and metaphoric ‘deflowering’” (Eaves et al. 230). How, though, does an act of deflowering – literal and/or metaphoric – translate into male actions? If males are traditionally, and even anatomically, the deflowerers (as is), can they maintain their masculinities in becoming deflowered themselves? Or do they, in essence, become somewhat hermaphroditic? Tony Rosso, in his paper “The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphrodism in Blake’s Rahab,” says that “[h]ermaphrodism isn’t necessarily a merging of genitalia so much as a monstrous merging in general,” and that “Blake interprets hermaphrodism as merging the Male and Female as required to achieve the perfect form.” John Middleton Murray, in his Note on Blake’s Visions, writes that Male and Female being one (as in the Bible story), “rather than the freedom of Oothoon, is Blake’s final answer to the riddle of sex” (21). The current prognosis of my Thesis is to find that “perfect form” within Blake’s Visions through my queering of it, and this piece, Oathe13 Embracing Calthalendula, begins that divining.